If you like intellectual travel-writing on cities, you might enjoy some of the work that I do on the personal blog, Creature of the Shade. Most posts there are on either cities or nature, and sometimes both. My pieces on cities tend to dwell on architecture and urban form, and usually track unstructured long walks (what Baudelaire called flânerie) across the city in question. Posting there is much more intermittent than here, so if you like it you'll probably want to put it on a reader.

In 2009 I did fairly satisfying pieces on Berlin and Paris, and a short mood-piece on the Netherlands (which can be understood as one city, the Randstad, and its rural hinterland.) There are decent 2008 pieces on Delhi and Visakhapatnam in India. And while I find it impossible to write as a traveler about cities I live in, a small piece on Sydney happened while the place was still new to me. The 2006 Montréal post is not bad.

Human Transit is on hiatus until January 2, but I realize some of you need a regular fix, and might drift away if I don't provide it.

So I thought I'd offer some links to posts from 2009 that seem, to me, to be especially durable and broadly relevant -- posts that I'm pretty sure will still be useful years or even decades from now. If you haven't read everything already, I encourage you to have a look at these.

Are there other Human Transit posts I should be featuring this way? If so, please mention and link to them in comments.

Finally, of course, please see the excellent blogrolls in the far right column. I don't list every blog that asks me to list them, only those that seem to be up to a certain standard and that regularly offer useful perspectives or insight.

Transit is often a source of frustration in Sydney, but no city I've encountered offers better transit options for getting into the natural world. Sydney is ringed on all sides by spectacularnationalparks. Most are served by the electrified outer-suburban train lines, which run usually every 30-60 minutes and deliver you to small stations right at a trailhead. It's remarkably easy to go for a long day of hiking, or even to launch a backpacking trip, without a car. One of the longest day hikes I've ever done was 26 km along the coast of the Royal National Park just south of the city. Using a train+ferry at one end of the hike and the train at the other, the whole trip was possible, and even pleasant, on transit.

On Saturday, as part of a long day of hiking in Brisbane Water National Park
just north of Sydney, I had occasion to use what some claim to be
Australia's smallest railway station, Wondabyne. It's at the center of this Google Earth image (easily found as "wondabyne, nsw, au").

Wondabyne is the only
station on Sydney's huge rail network that cannot be reached
by car. It lies on a stretch where the tracks follow the shore of an ocean inlet. The station has the water on one side, and steep wild hills on the other, but no roads.

In Australia, a
named dot on the map is no guarantee of a town. The "suburb" of Wondabyne consists of a small quarry hidden in the bush, a couple of houses, a simple wooden dock suitable for fishing, and a
trailhead leading into the national park. That's it.

The platform is less than one car-length long; only the rear car of a train can open there, and only if someone requests the stop.

On the one hand, Wondabyne Station is a dreadful precedent. We can't possibly build a rail station to serve every possible rural destination, and you wouldn't want to ride a train that might stop at all of them.

On the other hand, waiting for the train at Wondabyne, watching a sole fisherman at work on the little dock, listening to the birds and the waves, hearing no human sounds apart from automated train announcements and the conversation of my companions, it was possible to imagine I was in a post-automotive world, or at least a post-petroleum one.

Anyone interested the transit effects of weather will appreciate this press release from WMATA in Washington DC, announcing the suspension of all above-ground transit services in the current snowstorm.

Metrorail trains will stop serving above-ground stations at 1 p.m.
today, Saturday, December 19, due to heavy snowfall that is covering
the electrified third rail, which is situated eight inches above the
ground. The third rail must be clear of snow and ice because it is the
source of electricity that powers the trains. Metro officials believe
that by 1 p.m. the exposed third rail will be covered by snow. All
Metrobus and MetroAccess service also will stop at 1 p.m. because
roadways are quickly becoming impassable.

(The release also includes this "snow map" of the rail network. Faded-out segments are above-ground and therefore not operating.)

Those of us who work around government are often used to a certain guardedness and shadings of meaning in public announcements of agencies and politicians. To us, such a simple and direct statement of the facts can feel like a blinding insight, much like the effect of sunlight reflected on snow.

This post,
which points out that transit can't be judged on the low ridership of
services where ridership isn't the goal, drew this question from Rob:

I have a
question about cities with weak urban cores. I don't know much about
Seattle, but the story that the numbers tell is that the city's
population is currently near its historical high. But what do you do in
cities that are losing population, like many in the rust belt? In my
hometown, Cleveland, the population is lower than it's been since 1900.
Many urban neighborhoods are no longer the densest areas (there are 3
inner-ring suburbs more dense than the city-proper). What do you think?

As I explained, if Seattle's King County Metro were pursuing a pure ridership objective, it would cut almost all service in the low-density suburbs and put all those buses in Seattle as higher frequencies on dense corridors. The principle is the same in any network:

If your goal is ridership, follow patterns of dense development with intense service.

This principle explains why San Francisco has more than half of the Bay Area's transit ridership despite having barely a tenth of its population. And it explains why, if you rank any transit agency's services by productivity (passengers per unit of service cost), the high-frequency lines in the densest part of the city always come out on top.

The answer to Rob is that different cities may have different patterns of density, so in your city the highest-ridership area may not be the historic core. On the other hand, even substantially neglected cores trigger strong ridership because even if density is lower than it could be, it's often still higher than in the suburbs.

When I started working at Portland's Tri-Met in 1983, the most productive bus routes were already all in the inner city, in areas that would look pretty neglected to you if you visited them via time machine from the gentrified Portland of today. Even when flight-to-the-suburbs was at its maximum, there were lots of people left in the inner city, and their relative poverty was only part of why they were still on the bus system. It was also because the bus system worked well for them, and worked well in the kind of geography they lived in.

(If anyone can find productivity-by-line statistics for some "neglected-core" cities like Detroit or Cleveland, I'd love to see them. But I bet you'll find that even in such places, there are a lot of transit riders left in areas that look abandoned to you, and that inner-city service is still performing pretty well.)

This is also an example where "design" comes in. If you press on the "follow patterns of dense development" rule, what's under it is principle of a radius of demand. A transit stop's market is the area that's within a fixed walk distance radius. Since it's a fixed radius, it's a fixed area, so the number of people and jobs and activities there is determined by density. However, some people may be within the fixed radius but not able to walk to the stop because of barriers in the street network, and such barriers are much more common in newer suburbs than in old core cities. The fully connected grid street networks of old urban cores generally minimize walking distances and thus maximize the real radius of demand.

In this post, I argued transit can't be judged on the low ridership of
services where ridership isn't the goal, and explained that every transit system has "Coverage" services, designed to achieve a perception of equity and/or to meet the severe needs of small numbers of people. Coverage services generally cover low-density areas where ridership will always be relatively low.

In the comments, David Marcus asked a really important clarifying question, one that I hear often from elected officials in low-density places:

Could the empty-running coverage-oriented
buses be replaced with some sort of dial-a-ride system running full?

Yes, where you have a low-density and therefore low-ridership
market, you can often replace empty fixed route buses with Dial-a-Ride
systems. Dial-a-Ride in this context means a form of demand-responsive service, usually run with small buses or vans, where the route followed through its territory is different on each trip based on who calls and asks for the service. Dial-a-Rides can be ordered by phone or website, just like taxis but with less flexibility. Pickup times may not be ideal, and unlike a taxi your Dial-a-Ride van will make other stops to carry other passengers along the way.

But Dial-a-Ride systems rarely have many more riders than the
fixed routes they replaced. More commonly, these transitions increase
productivity (riders/unit of service cost) by acting mainly on the bottom of
that ratio, i.e. they serve the same small numbers of people with
service that's less expensive to operate.

In a typical big urban region, the highest-performing all-day routes
-- the ones that run high frequency through dense parts of the city --
usually score over 30 boardings per revenue hour and often closer to 50.
(A revenue hour is one transit vehicle operating for one hour.)
Physically, it's almost impossible for a Dial-a-Ride style of operation
to serve more than 10 boardings per revenue hour. Now if you have a low-density area where empty fixed bus routes are running around
scoring 5 boardings per revenue hour, I may be able to replace those buses by half as many Dial-a-Ride vans serving basically the
same people, and thus scoring 10 boardings per revenue hour. That's an improvement, but it doesn't begin to bring these low-density places
into the performance league of high-density ones, where 20 boardings
per revenue hour is considered disappointing.

In other words, Dial-a-Ride can be a great option for optimizing Coverage service, but we're still talking about Coverage service in either case. Dial-a-Ride can't raise a low-density area's productivity into a league that would match service in high-density areas. Again, the very nature of Dial-a-Ride caps its productivity at around 10 boardings/hour, because that's about the maximum number of times in an hour that a van can get to a specific address or street-corner where someone has called for it. (Remember that when talking about low density we're usually also talking about labyrinthine street patterns that are designed to make it hard to get quickly in and out.)

I should clarify, too, that when I say Dial-a-Rides usually don't attract a lot of new riders, I'm talking narrowly about a case where a bunch of empty-bus fixed routes are replaced by Dial-a-Ride vans. I'm also talking about Dial-a-Ride in the transit context, where multiple passengers are consolidated into one vehicle by making multiple stops, and thus often following a circuitous path. There are higher-end forms of Dial-a-Ride, such as door-to-door airport shuttles, but these are another matter.

UPDATE: Anonymouse kicks off with a good, concise statement of a common comment:

It seems like dial-a-ride systems could benefit massively from the
improved dispatching that computers make possible, and things like
smartphones could greatly improve the user interface as well. You could
have an app that lets you order a ride from "here" (determined by GPS)
to a point that you pick on a map, letting you know how long it will be
until you are picked up and how long the trip will likely take, and how
much it will cost. Very different, and likely to be much more popular,
than the earlier model of "schedule your ride at least 24 hours in
advance".

Dial-a-Ride is an area of great technological ferment. There are lots of opportunities to improve the ways that Dial-a-Ride can be dispatched, making more spontaneous use possible. These improvements could vastly expand the demand for Dial-a-Ride, but they don't change the physical limits of supply.

Look at it from the perspective of the driver, who sees the calls pop up on the screen. Regardless of the dispatch method, Dial-a-Ride means each passenger requires her own bit of routing and a separate stop. In this style of operation, will you really be able to pick up a passenger every three minutes, on average, all day? That's what it means to achieve 20 boardings per revenue hour, an astronomical performance for a Dial-a-Ride but still very low for an urban fixed route. The only way to get higher performance is if you get lots of people traveling as groups, i.e. not requiring the individual responsiveness that is the whole point of Dial-a-Ride.

This whole issue is important because it's common to hear talk of Dial-a-Ride innovation as though it somehow changes the fundamentals of service to low-density areas. It does not. Labor remains the dominant element of transit cost in developed countries, so ridership per revenue hour remains a good unit for assessing performance. Dial-a-Rides can do wonderful things, but they're still Coverage services, and in any large urban area, you wouldn't run them if maximum ridership were your only goal.

New York City transit supporters are on fire today as their transit agency, the MTA, announced deep service cuts. Service cuts are happening all over the US this year, as the economic crisis has cut into most of the local funding streams on which agencies rely. In many cases, including California and New York, the problems have been compounded by raids on state transit funding streams to help balance state budgets.

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around for New York MTA's especially dire straits. The New York Times offers three expert views on their "Room for Debate" forum, though the three don't seem to be disagreeing. Two emphasize the need for more secure government funding, while the third points out the need to push back harder on labor costs, and it sounds like they can all be right. None of them says that service cuts are a good thing.

But here's an eerie echo of my last post, where I pointed out that sometimes transit agencies don't deliver environmental outcomes because they're being required to serve other competing goals. This stunning graphic from Second Avenue Sagas tells a similar story about the New York MTA, but in the area of budgeting rather than service design.

It appears that in 1995, the governments of the State of New York (NYS), New York City (NYC), and the MTA decided to split three ways the cost of discounted transit fares for students.

Student ridership (high school and below) is a mixed blessing for transit agencies. You'll hear a lot about how great it is that kids are "forming transit habits" at an early age. But school-kids consume more than their per-capita share of the transit budget, and not just because they are more likely to damage buses and trains than adults are. Schools tend to generate extremely high and sharp peaks -- very brief periods of the day when huge numbers of students want to travel. Extreme peaking means overcrowding that disrupts schedules and that often requires extra buses to be pulled out for very short shifts. Very short work shifts, in turn, mean higher per-hour labor costs, because labor contracts usually define a minimum shift period (often 4 hours) and the period of school demand is often much shorter.

During the 1990s, when I was a consulting planner in California, something similar was happening all over the state. School districts, facing budget cuts, were choosing to cut school bus service rather than cut education, and the problem of school transportation was shifted, without much funding, to the transit agencies. The worst part of this was that once school districts no longer cared about transport, they no longer thought about transport efficiency when they set their bell times, so transit agencies were constantly dealing with unreasonable expectations from schools about when they could serve them. If four different schools all let out at 3:10 PM and want you to be there waiting, that's four buses you have to buy and maintain and four short driver shifts you have to run. And the parents aren't yelling at the school, they're yelling at you, the transit agency. When the schools had to do their own transport, they were more likely to stagger bell times so that longer shifts and fewer buses could do the same work.

So student discounts that push student ridership higher are going to be expensive for a transit agency, even if the agency's being compensated for the lost revenue. But the MTA generously agreed to pay a third of the discount's cost, while the City and State were supposed to pick up the other two thirds. The chart shows what happened next. For some reason, as costs of this discount continued to grow due to growing numbers of children, the MTA found itself making up the difference. (Note to dealmakers: state the deal in percentages, not dollars!) Finally, in the budget crises of 2008, the State cut its own contribution. Suddenly, MTA was paying the full cost of a discount that didn't really serve the agency's mission. And of course, when they discussed reducing it, the story was cruel MTA trying to balance the budget on the backs of poor students.

It's a brutal reminder that in many US urban areas, the multiple layers of government don't always support each other, and that especially in lean times they are strongly tempted to renege on the all-too-informal agreements that glue the system together. In such moments, it often comes down to pure political clout, and special-purpose governments such as regional transit agencies usually have less clout than the governments of states or major cities. So sometimes, as in this case, they end up bearing costs because they were the weakest party of the deal.

So "Why is the MTA always in trouble?" When even the transit-friendly New York Times frames the question that way, we really do have a problem. If you're told that your neighbor's teenage son is "always
in trouble," aren't you going to assume that the trouble must be his
fault? We're being encouraged to think of transit, or at least the MTA, as having some kind of ongoing sustainability problem or weakness. To compound the insult, we hear talk of whether MTA needs a "bailout." Cap'n Transit explores how these "frames" work in a must-read post today.

The MTA may be "always in trouble" because it hasn't made tough deals, but the toughness of the deals it can make, especially with more powerful levels of government, depends on the public's ability to blame the correct layer of government for the problem. This is hard to do, because overlapping governments are often not as clear as they should be about who's responsible for what. Cap'n Transit also discussed this a year ago, here.

The only real long-term solution to this problem is for MTA to figure out how to be more transparent. Organizations don't really like to be transparent, because if you're perfectly transparent you're invisible, and then nobody appreciates you. But if you're completely opaque, you'll end up wearing all the blame, because blame and praise are both like light in this case.

Part of transparency is avoiding deals like the three way funding split of the New York school subsidy. Don't just split the subsidy three ways. Instead do the harder work of deciding why we fund school transportation and which level of government should be funding that outcome. If you're going to split the subsidy three ways, be really clear about what happens when the demand rises and/or someone reneges on the deal. The correct answer should be that the subsidy drops in ways that students will notice, and all parties to the deal refer complaints to the party who really dropped the ball. Another angle would be for the MTA to demand clear separate pots of funding for (a) its ridership-maximizing mission, with all the environmental and urban life benefits, and (b) its social service mission, which is about responding to the needs of specific groups with low-ridership buses or fare discounts. Let the legislature decide how much it wants MTA to spend on each goal, and then get out of the way and let them do it. (Much more on this angle here.)

And aim, too, for clearer divisions of responsibility. If we're talking about funding for student transportation, there's a credible argument that it should go through the education budget. The taxpayer doesn't care. It's the same dollar out of her pocket whether it's an education subsidy or a transport subsidy. Educational institutions have massive impacts on the real costs of student transportation through (a) how they set belltimes and (b) where they locate schools. Of course, that would imply that everyone else is also responsible for the transport cost impacts of where they choose to locate, and if we opened those floodgates, the sudden transparency might be blinding.

Finally, to New York commenters, please feel free to correct me on matters of fact, but note that I am not claiming MTA's problems are solely due to the school subsidy, nor assigning broader blame for their troubles. This story isn't really for New Yorkers at all; it's for everyone else who's ever wondered why their transit agency seems to be "always in trouble." Short answer: it may not be their fault. So don't automatically rip into your transit agency when they cut service, at least not until you understand who else may have let you down.

Everyone should know how to respond to stories like this, because they'll keep coming. From Kevin Libin at Canada's National Post, an article called 'Save the Environment: Don't Take Transit." It quotes the usual suspects, but it still needs a clear response:

“Subsidized transit is not sustainable by definition,” says
Wendell Cox, a transport policy consultant in St. Louis, and former
L.A. County Transportation commissioner. “The potential of public
transit has been so overblown it’s almost scandalous.”

It’s not
that environmentally minded transit promoters are being dishonest when
they argue that city buses are more efficient than private cars: It’s
that they’re talking about a fictional world where far more people ride
buses. Mass transit vehicles use up roughly the same energy whether
they are full or empty, and for much of the time, they’re more empty
than full.

For the bulk of the day, and on quieter routes, the
average city bus usually undoes whatever efficiencies are gained during
the few hours a day, on the few routes, where transit is at its peak.

In 19 years as a transit planning consultant, I've studied the operations of at least 100 bus and bus+rail systems on three continents, and I have never encountered one whose overriding goal was to maximize its ridership. All transit agencies would like more people to ride, but they are required to run many empty buses for reasons unrelated to ridership or environmental goals. To describe the resulting empty buses as a failure of transit, as Cox does, is simply a false description of transit's real, and conflicted, objectives.

If public transit agencies were charged exclusively with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they'd be full. Every competent transit planner knows how to do this. Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities. In lower-density areas, you'd run only narrowly tailored services for brief surges of demand, such as trips to schools at bell-times and commuter express runs from suburban Park-and-Rides to downtown. If you do such a massive shift of resources, I promise your productivity (ridership per unit of cost) will soar, and you won't have as many empty buses.

Why do we know that's the answer? Because if you rank a transit agency's lines by productivity (riders per unit of cost), the top ranking services are almost all in one of these categories: either (a) all-day high-frequency service to areas of high density or (b) peak-only commuter express from suburban centers to downtown, or (c) services to suburban schools at bell-times.

So if we were talking about Seattle's King County Metro area, for example, a ridership-maximizing service plan would probably offer no all-day transit service outside the City of Seattle except for links to the densest suburban centers such as downtown Bellevue and perhaps some older, denser inner-ring suburbs such as Renton and Burien. Beyond that, the suburbs would have nothing but school services and express buses to Seattle at rush-hour. In the dense urban fabric of Seattle, on the other hand, you'd have buses or streetcars every three minutes on every major street, with lots of rapid-bus overlays, etc, etc.

The outcry would be tremendous, the politics toxic, the prospects for implementation zero. I would never propose it. But there's no question that such a service change would dramatically increase ridership, dramatically reduce the number of empty buses, and thus improve how transit scores on the kind of tally that Cox and his allies propose.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, transit agencies have to balance contradictory demands to (a) maximize ridership and (b) provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for 'equity' and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons.

One analysis that I've done for several transit agencies is to sort the services according to whether they serve a "ridership" related purpose or a "coverage" related purpose. Ridership services are justified by how many people ride them. Coverage services are justified by how badly people need them, or because certain suburbs feel they deserve them, but not based on how many people ride. I encourage transit agencies to identify which are which. Once a transit agency can identify which of its services are tryingto maximize ridership, you can fairly judge how well those services are doing in meeting that objective, including all the environmental benefits that follow. Until then, the Cox argument is smoke and mirrors.

My 2008 Journal of Transport Geography paper on transit's multiple purposes, exploring how transit agencies can get control of this narrative, is here.

There is debate about the relative merits of investing in rail or
express bus modes to improve regional transit performance. The debate
largely assumes that both modes serve a single function of providing
higher speed service to the central business district (CBD) over
relatively long travel distances. The debate generally overlooks other
functions that might be served by express bus and rail transit modes
and thus ignores that the two modes may perform differently depending
on the service mission they are assigned. Performance of the two modes
is examined in four metropolitan areas with different strategies for
providing high-quality, regional transit service: a CBD-focused
strategy, a hybrid strategy that serves the CBD and a few other
destinations, and a multidestination strategy that serves a widely
dispersed set of destinations. ... It was found that the combination of a
rail transit backbone and a multidestination service strategy leads to
better performance than any other marriage of mode and mission.

In other words, (a) rail and bus technologies are tools, and no tool is right for every job, and (b) multi-destinational networks based on connections are more productive than radial systems that narrowly focus on a single downtown. Regular readers of this blog will find these conclusions obvious, but it's interesting to see that this argument still needs to be made in the literature.

UPDATE: Let me tease this apart a little further. I don't mean to imply that the work is redundant, but it does apply to a narrow range of cases, and it conflates "multi-destinational" with "rail" a little more than I'm comfortable with.

The authors' focus is on four cities which they locate on a spectrum from "CBD-oriented" to "multi-destinational."

Pittsburgh, which they identify as the most "CBD-oriented."

Minneapolis, which they identify as transitional or hybrid.

Atlanta and San Diego, which they identify as "multi-destinational."

These cities are all comparable in size, all have a mix of rail and bus, and all have some facilities for getting express buses out of traffic at least some of the time, ranging from the full busways of Pittsburgh to the freeway-shoulder operations of Minneapolis.

A CBD-oriented system (more commonly called a radial system) is one that views downtown as the sole destination of importance. In such a system, people who aren't going downtown usually have to go via downtown, whether or not this is on the way. A multi-destinational system is one that tries to serve trips to many destinations all over the city. If you live in Los Angeles or Manhattan or Paris or Berlin, this distinction will seem silly to you, because your city has been multi-destinational for decades if not centuries and your transit system adapted to that reality long ago. But most American (and Australasian) cities had a period, generally ending around 1945, when they had a single extremely concentrated downtown -- fueled, in many cases, by streetcar/tram networks that converged on it. And at one time, it made perfect sense that this downtown would be the sole focal point of the transit network.

Since 1945, most cities have been becoming more multi-destinational, with more important destinations (employment, retail, leisure, etc) scattered all over the city. Transit agencies were generally slow to adjust, especially since downtown tended to be where they were most appreciated and where the pre-car development pattern made it easy for pedestrians to get to them. But over time, it's been necessary to adjust to a multi-destinational pattern in order to remain relevant to the life of the city as it is now. The paper suggests that of the four cities studied, Atlanta and San Diego are relatively far along on that path, Pittsburgh least so. (This seems to match Alan Hoffman's observation (here, page 67) that despite the introduction of busways, the Pittsburgh network has changed relatively little for a long time.)

Note that the important distinction here is not that the network infrastructure is more or less CBD-oriented, but that the thinking of the transit agency is. All four of the cities studied have CBD-oriented transit infrastructure that suits their CBD-oriented history, but they have thought about their networks in different ways.

By comparing the experience of these four cities, the authors find that the most effective system is not the CBD-oriented but the multi-destinational. Needless to say, your mileage may vary; it depends on how CBD-oriented your city still is, but even a city as CBD-oriented as Portland had great success with a multi-destinational network. Most of the major network redesigns I've done have been about helping CBD-oriented systems still meet their CBD need while also being relevant to a wider range of destinations.

My only quibble is that multi-destinational systems don't have to mean "rail and bus working together" because you can do the same thing in smaller or pre-rail cities by designing an all-bus system to work just the way a good bus+rail system would work. I was the lead planner on a redesign for San Antonio around 2001-2, shortly after their voters had rejected light rail. We did what we could to create a connective frequent network given that they only had buses to work with. Following Portland's model, we did this with a mixture of high frequency grids in the denser inner city and trunk-and-feeder systems in the outer suburbs. As a side effect, that project helped to intensify and simplify services in a concentrated corridor (Fredericksburg Road) where they're now planning Bus Rapid Transit, and light rail is being talked about again.

Portland, too, did it with buses first. Their multi-destinational route network (including the frequent grid covering the inner city and the trunk-and feeder structures for major outer suburbs) all were put in place by 1982, four years before the first light rail line opened. Rail sometimes leads, but sometimes the result of good multi-destinational network planning, not its cause or starting point.

In the last post, commenting briefly on how some San Franciscans were lamenting the deletion of the uncrowded and redundant bus line 26-Valencia, I compared the 26 to a restaurant ....

Yes, we all like to ride uncrowded buses. I really enjoy dining in
uncrowded restaurants too. And yet the odd thing is, however much I
patronize my favorite uncrowded restaurants, they seem to go out of
business sooner than the crowded ones do. I wonder why that is.

As always, the danger of fast posting is that you end up with comments that are much smarter than the post. Commenter Spyone, for example, explained some of the economics of the restaurant business.

In
transit, the vehicle itself is the service provided to the customers,
and (to a limit) additional customers do not increase cost. In a
restaurant, a tiny fraction of the customer's bill pays for his chair. Due to this fact, a restaurant actually operates best if it is rarely
full. The extra chairs represent emergency capacity (for special events
and the like), while it is the staffing that is adjusted to meet
projected demand.

Which oddly leads me to realize on of the major problems with
creating a frequent network: in most transit systems, staffing is
per-vehicle rather than per-passenger, so it is more cost effective to
serve more passengers by using bigger vehicles rather than more
vehicles. If frequency is your goal, the opposite is what you want:
more vehicles (possibly smaller vehicles if that represents any kind of
savings) running more often.

In both restaurants and buses, what matters is not the crowdedness of the space but the ratio of customers to employees, because at least in the high-wage developed world, the employees are the dominant element of cost. The attentive service good restaurants provide is the result of getting this ratio right. In most transit in the high-wage developed world, the right ratio of passengers to drivers is "as high as possible up to the limits of civilized comfort," which is admittedly an elastic and culturally determined limit.

The dominance of labor in transit's cost explains why there's so little money to be saved by running smaller buses in areas of smaller demand. I've met many small-bus proponents who talk as though we could just chop all our big buses in half and have twice as many small ones, but alas, it doesn't work that way. Small vehicles may be marginally more fuel-efficient and offer a more intimate look-and-feel, but these are small factors compared to the constant cost of labor.

I've
seen plenty of uncrowded restaurants that have stuck around for years. To amplify what Spyone wrote, one difference between restaurants and
buses is that a popular restaurant is able to raise its prices to both
reduce crowding and compensate for the revenue lost. If your demand
curve runs the right way, you can often make more money serving less
customers.

In fact, the express buses here in New York cost $5.50, more than
double the regular $2.25 fare, and they rarely have anyone standing.
It's my understanding that they're still subsidized, but less than they
would be if they were $2.25. On one level it would be best for the
agency if every route - or every itinerary, or even every trip - had a
different fare based on the supply and demand. Of course, it would also
be confusing and frustrating to the passengers, and probably wind up
driving more business away.

Actually, I explored that idea in a thought experiment, here. What if fares were inversely related to crowding? We could endure crowded conditions for a bargain, or pay more for more space, just as we do on the airlines. It's actually possible to imagine, with the next generation of smartcards, a fare system where fares varied in real time according to how crowded the vehicle was. Essentially, you'd be charging for transit the same way you and a few friends might pay for a ride you take together -- by splitting the actual cost among you. I'm not recommending this, but I do recommend thinking about it as a way to broaden your notion of what fares can do. The Cap'n goes on:

Whenever I hear about a route being eliminated, though, I always
worry that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, or at least a vicious
cycle. Who wants to bother waiting around for twenty minutes if you can
walk a block east and get a bus in five? It makes me wonder: what if
they ran that route every five minutes for a month? If people knew that
the route was going to be frequent and dependable, would they start
really using it?

Often, a route that does something unique in the network may fail because it was never run frequently enough, but the 26-Valencia, which was only a block from parallel service on Mission St., was not one of those. Yes, you might have saved the service by investing massively in it, but that wouldn't have changed the fact that the Valencia and Mission markets are mostly overlapping, so you'd have ended up dividing the market between these two streets, yielding a much less efficient network. The most efficient network gives you one line that goes the direction you want to go, and then runs the greatest possible frequency on it, including a mixture of local-stop and limited-stop service if the corridor is long, as Mission is.

Pantheon, meanwhile, was curious about why a bus route engages such feelings of attachment, even among people who admit they didn't ride it much:

Following
the links in the Streetsblog article, one comes across a page of
tributes to the 26 which read like obituaries for a dearly departed
loved one. Here's a taste:

"I’ve lived a half-block from Valencia for well more than six years
now, yet I can count the number of times I’ve ridden the 26-Valencia on
1.5 hands. It’s almost always a foggy ride, not due to the weather, but
more to how much liquor I’ve imbibed. Or sometimes, it was simply the
amount of warm pizza in me, and with the wind-chill factor factored in,
and the randomness of a 26-Valencia magically showing up to cart my
friends and loved ones on down the avenue to the safety and warmth of
our homes …".

I think this illustrates the deep emotional attachment people
develop towards bus routes. Once established, they become part of the
urban fabric. They are almost like a kind of mobile architecture. And
if taken away, you miss them the way you would miss a grand old
building that was destroyed to make way for a parking garage.

One of the joys of life in a big city is that anything, even a bus line, can be a gateway to associations and memories, like Proust's madeleine. Pantheon goes on:

Here's
hoping the residents of Valencia can recover from their loss, perhaps
heal their sorrows with some liquor and warm pizza, and enjoy the short
walk home.

I'm sure they'll be fine, because the walk from Mission to Valencia is very short indeed.

Streetsblog San Franciscoreports on the first day of the most substantial bus network changes in 30 years, including the first Monday without the 26-Valencia bus line, which was finally abolished after a century of semi-redundant operations.

As I explained here, the 26 ran infrequently along Valencia Street, just one block west of very frequent services on Mission Street, so it's long been the case that if you don't see a 26 coming, it's usually faster to walk to Mission than wait for the next 26.

Streetsblog reports the changes went pretty smoothly. But they also captured the wistfulness of the moment.

Other riders said they recognized the abundance of transit
alternatives, and the 26's low frequency made it an understandable
candidate for cancellation. Still, some said they preferred it to the
Mission Street lines because of its less-crowded buses.

Yes, we all like to ride uncrowded buses. I really enjoy dining in uncrowded restaurants too. And yet the odd thing is, however much I patronize my favorite uncrowded restaurants, they seem to go out of business sooner than the crowded ones do. I wonder why that is.

As several commenters have mentioned lately, Boston's transit agency recently published a new network overview map, part of an overhaul of the information system. The new map is similar in function to a subway network map but with some key bus lines added. Here's a slice, but you can get the whole thing, in much better resolution, here.

Most large transit agencies with extensive rail transit publish a map of just the rail transit services. These tend to be the fastest, most frequent, and highest-capacity services in the network, so it makes sense that if you zoom out to a full-system overview, these are what you should see.

But when you look at the map asking a specific question -- "so how would I get from A to B? -- a standard rail transit map may not give you the answer, especially if you're outside the core. Most mature rail transit networks have a core area where many lines cross, forming a lattice of lines that can be used to get from almost any station to any other. Think London inside the Circle Line loop, or Lower Manhattan, or most of the city of Paris. But further out, the rail transit map presents single lines radiating outward from the city. To travel between two outer stations on different lines, the subway may not be the fastest route, because it will require you to go into the urban core and back.

In a smaller network like Boston's, there's only a small area downtown where many subway lines interconnect. Most of the network is formed by radial lines extending outward from downtown. So many, many trips between rail stations are not logically routed via the rail network. If you want to go, for example, from Harvard on the Red Line to Harvard Avenue station on the Green Line, you don't want the Red Line or the Green Line, you want bus line 66. And while the 66 isn't as frequent as a subway (its midday frequency is 16 minutes, which usually means it used to be 15) it's still going to get you there sooner than taking the subway into downtown Boston and back out.

I don't know the intentions behind the selection of "key bus routes," but that's the best sense I can make of it. And as such, it makes good sense. As always, I would prefer to see a Frequent Network map, where the appearance of a line guaranteed high frequency, but such a map would probably be much more crowded in the core of Boston, and less suited to getting a zoomed-out picture of the whole network.

(And yes, the map's representation of the Silver Line, in the southeast part of this slice, makes me a little seasick. It seems to be saying that the Silver Line - Green Line connection, at Boylston, works in only one direction. In fact, the Silver Line [a Bus Rapid Transit service] is really four lines, and the apparent figure-eight is two of them overlapping. But there's no way I'd know that from this map.)

The Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) at the University of South Florida is under fire in Florida's legislature. State senator Mike Fasano (R), who chairs the committee overseeing spending by the state Department of Transportation, proposes to cut off funding to the transportation think tank. From the St. Petersburg Times article, it sounds as though Fasano is just looking to cut spending generally, by citing projects that supposedly make CUTR's work look arcane and unimportant:

Fasano reviewed a list of grants DOT awarded CUTR since 2001. He
specifically questioned $600,000 the center received in grants to
advise the DOT on drug abuse and $75,000 to study the state's Road
Ranger program.

But the reporter, Michael Van Sickler, also weighs in with an analysis of statements by various CUTR principals about rail transit. Van Sickler focuses in particular on CUTR's role as the host of the National Bus Rapid Transit institute, the largest US institute devoted to the study of BRT. Seeking a simple conflict storyline, he tries to make this a contest between rail people (good) and bus people (bad), and this binary structure is not just misleading, it's boring.

As you probably know by now, I'm neither a rail advocate nor a bus advocate. I'm an advocate of abundant mobility and access for the purpose of creating more sustainable cities, cities where real, expansive freedom is possible without a car. I think that abstract debates about whether rail is better than buses in general, everywhere, are pointless. Either rail or bus can be better depending on the circumstances, so an effective transit plan is one that evaluates that choice separately for each corridor, picks what works best there, and thus constructs an integrated citywide system where rail and bus work together.

Many activists and advocates really do believe that "rail vs. bus"
is the most important question in transit, and can be quite passionate
in defending their favored mode in the abstract. (And if you think all
these passionate activists are on the rail side, go talk to the Bus Riders Union
in Los Angeles.) These advocates will often assume that a statement
that doesn't support their view is really advocacy for the other side.
If you've ever listened to the political discourse inside a country at
war, you can think of other examples of this ("our way" vs "the
terrorists," "freedom" vs "socialism" etc.). Free thought, by
contrast, has the right to say that a certain binary opposition is a
false choice, or a wrong framing of the question, and insists on the
right to refuse to take sides in such an opposition.

Such free thought is hard to encourage inside a hot debate about a
particular transit project, because of course those debates are already
binary: Build this project or not? That's why academic research is an
important intellectual space. It's also why I write this blog.

Think tanks have a really important position in these debates. Good academic research on transit technology questions should be providing analysis about the pros and cons of various technologies, not to pick one as an abstract winner but rather to explain the kinds of situations in which each is appropriate. CUTR does this, but because a major piece of their transit research happens in their National Bus Rapid Transit Institute, they are easily accused of bias toward that mode. Still, two defenses of the Institute readily spring to mind:

It's understandable that when a particular technology idea is newly emerging or re-emerging, as
BRT was in the US a decade ago, some energy has to go into developing
the idea to the point where it can be fairly judged against other
options. I would like to say that BRT is past that point, but the US
still doesn't have a single example of BRT done to a fully
rapid-transit scale and quality, which is why I have to keep talking
about Brisbane.

You can also argue that it's reasonable to have a research function devoted to researching and even promoting Bus Rapid Transit because there's no shortage of equally promotional research about rail transit.

Meanwhile, academics are only human, and do sometimes say unfortunate things:

In this job, [CUTR founder Gary] Brosch lobbied for grant money, often sounding more
like a BRT advocate than the impartial expert CUTR held him out to be.

"BRT
is an idea whose time has come," said Brosch in 2003 testimony before a
U.S. Senate subcommittee. "Fast, convenient, and frequent service are
what transit users want, and BRT systems provide all of these factors
in a very cost-effective manner."

Now semiretired, the former CUTR director acknowledges favoring BRT over rail.

"I
personally became hugely enthused with (BRT)," Brosch said. "Rail is,
you know, rail is rail. It didn't excite me as a new transportation
technology."

That last statement is especially unfortunate, because it makes Brosch sound not just like a BRT advocate but someone who embraced BRT as a matter of fashion, for the thrill of the novelty itself. The tension between thinking and promoting exists in every think tank. Almost every think tank leans a bit too far toward promoting at some point. But I hope CUTR takes up the challenge to looks for ways to bolster its neutrality, because there's not nearly enough academic research on transit issues, and we need every brain we can get.

This friendly little graphic, which I found on Dan Wentzel's Pink Line blog, promotes the "Subway to the Sea," an extension of the Los Angeles Purple Line subway, largely under Wilshire Blvd., all the way to the beach at Santa Monica (map here). I like it as a logo, but it's also serves to explain why relatively few subways in coastal cities go all the way to the beach, and why they often stay back from the ocean a bit.

(It's not the "seawall" problem. The graphic suggests that the subway station and the ocean would separated by a vertical seawall, an especially expensive and risky construction project. This would not be the case in Santa Monica, which has a gently sloping beach, though there might be some related engineering issues.)

No, the real problem is the radius of demand. The ridership potential of any station or stop depends mostly on what's within walking distance of it. How many residents are there? How many jobs? How much retail and other activity, and how many people will that attract on a daily basis?

This "area served" by a station is usually visualized as a circle of a fixed radius. You can argue about how big the radius is, but for a subway station it's at least 0.5 mi / 800m and arguably over 1.0 m / 1600m. In reality, it's a fuzzy circle where demand grows weaker as you get further from the station.

But it's a fixed radius, which means a fixed area. So the amount of development in that fixed area -- in other words, density -- is the largest determinant of the size of the market. (Connections, of course, also play a role, along with park-and-ride, bike-and-ride etc. But the walk radius is still fundamental.)

If your station is right at the beach, this circle obviously sticks out into the ocean. And since there's no development there, the rest of the circle -- the few blocks around the station right at the beach -- needs to be even denser than it would otherwise need to be.

The Los Angeles "Subway to the Sea" is envisioned ending at Santa Monica's 4th Street, about 1/4 mile back from the beach, but the radius of demand is larger than that, so this will still be an issue.

This is a particular issue when we're talking about ending the line at the beach -- as opposed to just running along the beach as, say, New York's Rockaway branches do. That's because the end of the line needs to be an especially high ridership generator, or what transit planners call an anchor.

As you get near the end of a transit line, the vehicle tends to empty out because it's going fewer places and therefore attracts fewer boardings. This can lead to permanent wasted capacity near the end of the line, what we call a weak anchor. A strong anchor is a big destination right at the end of the line that compensates for this problem by giving lots of people a reason to use the line all the way to its endpoint.

The anchoring principle is why I suspect that the Wilshire subway may well end at or near Westwood/UCLA, 4-5 miles back from the beach, at least in its initial segment. Westwood/UCLA is a massively strong anchor, defined by highrise employment, highrise housing, and a huge university. Nothing in Santa Monica is (or wants to be) anywhere near that dense. The "Subway to the Sea" graphic does suggest a Santa Monica beachfront with far more tall buildings than are there today, but I have trouble imagining the massing of buildings against the ocean that you'd need to generate a strong anchor for something as expensive and high-capacity as the terminus of a rapid transit subway.

This is a good reason to design subways so that they have room to turn as they approach the ocean, so that they are potentially extendable parallel to the beach. In the case of Santa Monica, I could certainly imagine designing a line ending far enough back from the beach that it could turn southward someday, extending south through Venice perhaps along Lincoln Blvd. Such a line would match the design of New York Subway's Rockaway and Coney Island services, which both turn and run along the beach -- usually 1/4 mile or so back from it. The Far Rockaway branch actually swings further from the beach at its endpoint in Far Rockaway, thus ending in a location where the entire circle around the station is developed, yielding a stronger anchor.

Ultimately, lots of people love the idea of a subway to the sea for the same reason they like the idea of a subway to the airport -- because they can imagine using it occasionally. This can yield a disconnect between the political popularity of a service and its actual ridership potential. Just something to watch out for as the subway rolls toward the sea.

(Nothing in this post is meant to express a fixed opinion about the ultimate shape of the Los Angeles Purple Line.)

In the post on including Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on rapid transit maps, I showed a bit of Brisbane's rapid transit map, which includes the busway but not its branches, since the branches aren't rapid.

(Actually, to be quite fair, it's really a rail + rapid transit map, as it includes rail lines that do not rise to 15-minute frequencies all day.)

To complement that map, here's Brent Palmer's latest draft of a frequent network map for Brisbane. For a fully legible version, see his blog here. (Click on the small map there for the big one, then click again to zoom in so you can read it. Despite the photo of Seattle on his banner, his blog seems pretty dedicated to Brisbane.)

This should give you a sense of both the extent of Brisbane's frequent network and the way the network functions through the busway. The busway is the band of routes extending southeast to Eight Mile Plains and north to "RBWH" (Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital).

In the lower left of the map, the bridge across the river into the University of Queensland ("UQ Lakes") is Brisbane's first green bridge, a bridge for transit, bicycles, and pedestrians only. The most distinctive feature of Brisbane's inner city geography is the winding river with the remarkable shortage of bridges. This bridge allows transit to serve a trip that would be much, much more circuitous for a motorist, as there are no other car-capable bridges anywhere nearby.

It imagines a network of rapid transit subways many of which flow into surface rail lines, so presumably a model similar to San Francisco or Brussels or the Boston Green Line.

(He calls it a "tram-train" system, but it's actually the opposite of the pattern used by the celebratedtram-trains in Karlsruhe, because here "train" means a subway flowing through the center of the city, while in Karlsruhe the tram portion is the city and surface train lines are used to reach outer suburbs.)

Some problems to note even in a proposed utopia: Subways that flow into streetcar lines are often a poor fit, for three reasons:

Subways are very high capacity and streetcars usually lower, if only
because you physically can't run streetcars as frequently as you can
run subways. In both San Francisco and Brussels, the subway service
branches onto two or three streetcar branches, and that manages the
problem somewhat. But alas:

Streetcars in mixed traffic are exposed to many causes of delay, subways are not. Since a line is only as reliable as its least reliable point, the full capacity potential of the subway can never be used because cars are flowing in from the streetcar portion at unpredictable times.

Subways are very fast and streetcars very slow. It's rare for a demand pattern intense enough to require a subway to end so abruptly that the only thing you need are streetcars. In both San Francisco and Brussels, the feeling is that if a subway has to transition into a surface light rail form, it should ideally go into exclusive right-of-way so that it's still somewhat fast, and then perhaps transition to streetcar further out as loads are lower. (The M-line in San Francisco tries to do this.) Of course, this is not precisely what happens in either San Francisco or Brussels, because like all systems they are prisoners of the long-ago design of their infrastructure, and the city has grown in so tightly around the infrastructure at it is that it would be unimaginably expensive (in political pain as much as money) to change it.

All these issues will be familiar to transit riders in San Francisco and Brussels.

Note also that ending routes in one-way loops, as this fantasist does, is not the best practice unless the loops are very small (e.g. one block wide). That's because you need a driver break and recovery point at the end of the line, and you want the vehicle to be empty at that point. If you're ending in a large loop (planners sometimes call them "balloon loops") you have the same problem as the London Circle Line: there's never a point where everyone is off so the driver can have a rest and the vehicle can get back on schedule if it's a bit late. Even driverless systems need some spare time at end of line to recover from delays.

Most large transit agencies have a map that shows just their rapid transit services, which are usually rail. One good test of how an agency thinks about bus rapid transit is whether they include it on their rapid transit maps. Los Angeles County MTA's rapid transit map, here, does include the Orange Line, which is exclusive right of way but is hampered by signal delays. But they don't show their non-exclusive Metro Rapid product at this scale, which makes sense to me.

Here's what a bit of the Brisbane's regional rail map looks like. Note the busway is shown, extending north and southeast from downtown.

Note that they have shown only the exclusive portion of the busway, the segments where buses are coming every few minutes and have an exclusive, separated roadway that protects them from almost all delay. I would argue strongly that by any service-based or mobility-based definition of rapid transit, that service has to be included. In fact, it's much more reliable than light rail on the surface with intersections. In its speed, frequency, reliability, and station amenity, it does exactly what any rail rapid transit system does. You can decide that you won't use it because you don't like the ride quality, but a lot of people just want to know where they can get to via rapid transit, and this map is trying to be the answer.